PETER JACKSON
Amassing 500 matches among the European elite requires surviving an endurance test of brutal longevity: at least 25 appearances per season for at least 20 seasons preferably without too many broken bones. Precious few have managed it since the game went professional almost 30 years ago.
Those who have can be counted on the fingers of one hand: one from Wales, Australia, France and Ireland.
They include a pair of international locks (Donnacha O’Callaghan, Ian Gough), a back row forward (George Smith) and a French centre-wing (Aurelien Rougerie). Jason Robinson played more matches than them all, the majority in League as one of the stupendous Wigan team of the Nineties before crossing the divide to win the World Cup with England.
Once the new season gets underway, the marathon men will be joined by another of the species. Sergio Parisse’s second outing for Toulon in September will coincide with two imposing milestones, his 500th game and his 39th birthday.
Months of uncertainty as to whether he had come to the end of the road ended a fortnight ago with Toulon confirming that Italy’s most famous player still has a way to go.
Next season will be his 21st since he set out with Benetton Treviso in what was then still called the Celtic League.
“Sergio dreams of contributing to winning a title for the Toulonnais and continuing to share his experience with the younger players,” a club spokesman said. “His professionalism now allows him to carry on doing that until 2023.”
Since leaving Italy in 2005, Parisse has spent his entire career in the Top 14, a competition of unrelenting intensity where the clubs’ refusal to abandon relegation as a dirty word elevates it above the English Premiership as Europe’s supreme domestic event.
It will be his fourth season since retiring as Italy’s perennial captain, one which will take him far into his 40th year. The same can be said of Richard Wigglesworth and his new Leicester team-mate Jimmy Gopperth but neither is as close to 500 as Parisse.
If he stays in one piece, he will probably overtake O’Callaghan at the top of the pile. The genial Irish Lion from Cork played more games of Rugby Union in the professional era than anyone.
While the majority were for Munster and Ireland, O’Callaghan will long be remembered around Worcester for his last match, the resounding win over Harlequins which saved the Warriors from relegation four years ago.
Simon Shaw’s career stretched to 528 matches for Bristol, Wasps, Toulon, England and the Lions to within a few months of his 40th birthday. He began as a 17-year-old when amateurism, in the home countries if not everywhere else, had five years to run.
Ian Gough built his colossal total in the service of five clubs over 17 years –
Pontypridd, Newport, Dragons, Ospreys and London Irish. He retired in 2015, six years after playing the last of his 64 Tests for Wales.
Allan Bateman, the most accomplished cross-code centre of his time, played more games than any current professional, 538. His monumental career goes further back into amateur times than Shaw’s, all the way back to the mid-1980s for ten teams: Maesteg, Neath, Richmond, Northampton, Ebbw Vale, Wales and the Lions in Union, Warrington, Cronulla Sharks, Bridgend Blue Bulls, Wales and Great Britain in League.
Neil Back’s 508 matches for Nottingham, Leicester, England, the Lions and Barbarians spanned the last seven years of the amateur era and the first ten of professionalism.
Old stagers from the dim and distant past will wonder what all the fuss is about. Theirs was a very different time, before the advent of any official competitions when clubs would regularly cram up to 50 matches into their fixture lists.
500 or 600 appearances, more often than not for one club, were commonplace. Bob Penberthy, of Bob the ‘Bionic Elbow’ fame, will forever be the daddy of them all, a second row forward who played 877 first-team matches for Pontypridd from the start of the Sixties until the mid-Eighties.
The figure is an official one, unlike those recorded here in respect of the long-distance professionals. They are based on years of research into all competitive matches, including those for the Barbarians.
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